Internet users typically visit the same websites multiple times. For instance, users may visit a particular news site such as cnn.com every morning. Shoppers may visit amazon.com several times each year to make various birthday and holiday gift purchases. Sports enthusiasts may frequent a popular sports site such as espn.com, and the frequency of their visits may increase during the season of their favorite sport. While websites typically change their content over time to provide a more varied user experience, they typically provide the same content to all users. Thus, a user in Dallas who accesses cnn.com may receive the same news content as a user in New York who accesses the same site at the same time.
Some sites provide content specific to a user. For instance, when a user visits amazon.com, the website may display information related to their last purchase at amazon.com. In this way, the content provided to each user may be different.
Other sites allow a user to personalize a website by configuring the content provided on the site. For instance, yahoo.com enables users to configure a “my page” that shows news stories of a type selected by the user, weather predictions for an area selected by the user, and links selected by the user, all in a layout selected by the user. In this scenario, the content provider merely provides content according to the user's pre-determined specifications. All yahoo users who select “technology news” for their “my page” will receive the same technology news.
The extent to which content providers provide user-specific content is limited. Rather, the vast majority of content on the Internet is provided identically to all users who access a particular website. As a result, a significant portion of content provided to a specific user may not be of interest to that user. This content is essentially wasted space that takes the place of other content that may be more relevant to the user.
These and other drawbacks exist with current systems and methods.